Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2758
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Item AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF IMMIGRANT REVITALIZATION: UNVEILING THE CRIME-REDUCING POWER OF IMMIGRANT SOCIAL CAPITAL(2024) Chen, Xuanying; Vélez, María; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The consensus in the immigration-crime literature is that immigration either has a null or an inverse relationship with neighborhood crime (Ousey & Kubrin, 2018). These findings align with the “immigrant revitalization thesis,” which argues that immigration reduces neighborhood crime by producing immigrant social capital and developing community social control. However, the proposed revitalization process has been rarely tested empirically. This dissertation contributes to the current literature by examining the immigration-crime relationship at the neighborhood level and the intervening mechanism of immigration social capital using a large sample of neighborhoods across the U.S. Specifically, it investigates the mediating influence of stable families, multigenerational families, local businesses, and self-employment in the immigration-crime nexus. Using the newly collected National Neighborhood Crime Study 3 Pilot Panel data, I employ a series of fixed-effects and structural equation models (SEM) for violent crime and burglary. The findings highlight the importance of stable families, namely that immigrant neighborhoods bring in stable family structures that translate into less violence in the neighborhood. However, analyses do not find significant mediating influences for other forms of immigrant social capital. The results provide partial support for the immigrant revitalization perspective and warrant further methodological development and theoretical revision when studying the immigration-neighborhood crime link.Item Immigration and Neighborhood Crime: The Moderating Influence of City Labor Instability(2020) Chen, Xuanying; Vélez, María B; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The bulk of extant work finds that immigrant prevalence helps to reduce neighborhood levels of serious crime. These findings align with the “immigrant revitalization thesis” in which states that immigration reduces crime by strengthening social ties and attendant social controls as well as stimulating the local economy. Also, a city’s conditions are shown to be a substantial moderator for the immigration-crime nexus. Thus, this study tests whether labor instability at the city level shapes the immigration-crime relationship, and whether this interaction differs by gateway status. Using the National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS) which provides information on crime as well as demographics for 87 cities across 8,931 neighborhoods, I fit multilevel models for violent and property crime, and for gateway and non-gateway cities. This paper finds that in cities with a higher level of labor instability, immigrant prevalence is associated with reductions in neighborhood level of violent crime, but not property crime. This interaction effect is significant for violent crime regardless of cities’ gateway status but not for property crime.